Woodland treehouse

The lake was already there. The trees were already there. What this family in the Forest of Dean didn't have was a reason to walk down to either of them. They said as much on the first call, though not in those words - they talked about sitting outside with a glass of wine while the sun went off the water, and about their children disappearing into the woods for a whole afternoon and coming back with a story about something that hadn't happened.

So we made something that doesn't announce itself. It stands amongst the existing trees, decks falling away around it, a rope bridge running out to a raised platform and then - children being more ambitious than their parents remember being - a zip wire stretched across the lake. The deck levels are the part I'd point at. We set them to the ground rather than to the drawing: separate heights following the fall of the woodland floor, instead of one flat platform bullying its way through it. Slower. It's also why the structure reads as though it has been standing there fifteen years. If you have an overlooked piece of woodland and you're wondering whether it will take something like this, the honest answer is that the trees and the ground decide the shape first. We work backwards from them.

Their wish-list, when it finally got written down, had very little to do with a building. People assume a treehouse belongs to the children, and for a few hours a day it does - the invented games, the arguments about who is allowed where. And the moment on the zip wire platform where you either go or you don't. Then the light drops. The lake changes colour. Somebody carries two glasses down the path, sits on the lower deck, and the same structure is doing something else entirely. February as much as July, which surprised me. Perhaps what we actually built was a reason to keep walking down there...